Saturday, December 18, 2010

Freedom

[this is not a note about determinism]

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony this life
Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die
I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet, yeah
No change, I can't change, I can't change, I can't change,
but I'm here in my mold , I am here in my mold
But I'm a million different people from one day to the next
I can't change my mold, no, no, no, no, no
- The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Only 600 miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again. And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit...
- The Gods Must Be Crazy

The things Man does in life: being born, spending 30 years or so preparing to live in Man’s own construct, spending another 30 years or so establishing life in that construct, and finally spending the years left remembering the past and preparing for his demise.

Faced with such a revelation, it is only appropriate if Man asks this question,

Friday, December 3, 2010

Nietzsche and the WWE

Friedrich Nietzsche
What do Friedrich Nietzsche, a famous 19th century philosopher, and the World Wrestling Entertainment have in common?

It’s the same preferred morality.

If you watch the WWE, you’ll see that it has a different standard about what’s good and bad compared to general perception. Its good guys aren’t exactly the most humble, pitiful, or sympathetic people. They are, in fact, evil and arrogant sons of a gun; literally no different than its bad guys on that matter.

So how do we tell them apart?

It’s by looking at what they’ve actually got. The good guys are the ones who have what it takes to back up their attitude. The bad guys are the cowards who don’t even stand a chance in a fair fight.

Or in other words, the WWE’s morality is about power.

Bekasi Boys

The most impossible computer generated internet ad...



Oh really?

Friday, November 26, 2010

The Search of Reason

This article took weeks to reach its current state, which is only one-third (it still has a proper ending though).
To date, one of the hardest to write, perhaps due to it being somewhat holistic.
Don't know when it'll be finished. I've got a ton of papers to write.
One thing though, this whole 'writing a more serious philosophical-ish article' thing is not bad.

The Search of Reason

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Omen

Rain has been pouring heavily for the past few days, putting my neighborhood in a constant threat of flood.

My friends' relationships crumble to dust, leaving a trace of broken hearts.

A friend of a friend's car had a short circuit that broke into a real fire and real smoke.

A series of random unrelated contained events?

Perhaps.
Or maybe it's something else entirely.

Sometimes, the bad things around us happen as a natural and logical consequence of another bad thing,

which is exactly what happens to my world right now.

Yep,

Rick has come back to town.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Lembang 10

I took these in Lembang.
I should have taken pictures of natural landscape considering the spot, but my mood was going for objects.
I'm not a photographer (I don't think I can even be called an amateur one), that's why they're mediocre.
However, the experience made me realize how objects could be interesting.
Especially after a friend of mine bought a new camera and a very wide lens. It has a fixed aperture of 1/1.8 I think.
Blah.
This interest must wait.